'The Language Hoax. Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language'. John H. McWhorter (2014) New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 208. ISBN 978-0-19-936158-8

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The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language John H. McWhorter (2014) New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 208. ISBN 978-0-19-936158-8After works like Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of 'Pure' Standard English and The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, the volume under review continues the author's work first and foremost aimed at educating the general public about issues related to language and linguistics, a highly important task as I have noted on other occasions. This time it is a manifesto, as the author states in the first sentence of the Introduction: a manifesto which takes issue with the recent rise of Neo-Whorfianism and especially its popularized version divulgated by the media. After all, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis according to which the language we speak shapes the way we perceive the world seems quite appealing and is, at first sight, also politically correct. In McWhorter's words: 'Under Whorfianism, everybody is interesting and everybody matters' (p. xvi). At the same time, it is also dangerous as it suggests that humans are not mentally alike. McWhorter's aim is to show that the 'idea of languages as pairs of glasses does not hold water in the way that we may, understandably, wish it did' (p. xvii). According to him, language is, indeed, a lens - but not upon distinct humanities but humanity in general - and languages are fascinating in their own right.The Introduction (pp. ix-xx) introduces the reader to the questions at hand: What is (Neo-) Whorfianism all about? What are the stakes? What is this book about? To some extent, I have outlined that in the preceding.In Chapter 1, 'Studies Have Shown' (pp. 3-29), McWhorter conscientiously revises recent Neo-Whorfian research which shows that language does have an effect on thought. However, this effect cannot be deemed anything but the like of insignificant milliseconds in hitting buttons during laboratory reaction tests gauging to what extent, for instance, speakers of Russian with lexical items for both 'dark blue' and 'light blue' are more sensitive to shades of blue than speakers of languages which lack this distinction. Thence, concluding that a tribe whose languages lacks numbers is bad at maths (the case of the Brazilian Piraha extensively reported upon by the media in 2004) is akin to considering that a 'tribe without cars doesn't drive' (p. 16) or 'Legless Tribe [is] Incapable of Walking Because They Have No Words for Walk' (p. 21). Rather than language shaping the way we see the world, it is culture and language-external realities which have an impact on language, for instance in the form of specific terminology such as Japanese honorifics.In order to save Whorfianism, we might fancy 'Having It Both Ways?' which is precisely the title of Chapter 2 (pp. 30-58). Unfortunately, that doesn't work either. There just is no intrinsic necessity for language A to develop, say, evidential markers, while language B, spoken in a very similar environment, does not. As McWhorter puts it: 'Worldwide, chance is, itself, the only real pattern evident in the link between languages and what their speakers are like' (p. 45). Or that bubbles (or frills or ornaments) just happen to pop up somewhere in the soup.A central point made by the author in Chapter 3, 'An Interregnum on Culture' (pp. 59-72), is that sociohistorical conditions have affected language structure throughout human history: witness, for example, the fact that languages massively acquired at some point in history as L2 such as English, Mandarin Chinese, Persian, Swahili, and Indonesian tend to be less complex than what is the norm for human language.The author returns to the currently much-debated concept of linguistic complexity in the next chapter, 'Dissing the Chinese' (pp. 73-103). As it happens, Whorfian studies have compared a limited set of grammatical features of 'National Geographic' languages with English. For the reasons elaborated in the previous chapter, the outcome is that those languages seemingly encode reality in a more elaborate or exotic way than English. …